On the First Wednesday

The squirrels are running with impunity in my yard.

This is the first Wednesday night I've had to face since my beloved lab, Coach, died last week. To put it in perspective, this is the first Wednesday night I've ever spent in this house without him, and I've lived here over a decade. I hate it. My wife and girls are doing their Wednesday night thing - the weekly gathering for elementary kids at our church. I'm doing mine - cleaning up the kitchen, taking care of the dishes, keeping the house somewhat organized. But I'm doing it alone tonight. For the first time. There was no one to look askance at my choice of 90's rap for dish-doing motivation. There will be no one attempting to steal a chin scratch or bait me into a wrestling match while doing planks in my upcoming workout. When I swept the kitchen floor, I found the unthinkable: dropped cereal from the breakfast table. Much is amiss in the Dykstra household now that one of our members is gone. And I've decided to face it. Tonight. Right now. It must be done. And it must be done here.

I've got to get this down right, because it's my one chance to do it. If I wait it will be gone, all the half-sentences and broken thoughts and stray emotions that only become tangible through writing. Already I feel the reality of it slipping away, behind a mask of smiles, losing it's grasp on the fingertips of my consciousness as I feed distractions and distortions to my burdened soul. Am I capable of pausing, of staring it straight in the face, of naming it and claiming it as my own? Even now I am scared, knowing that at the keys and the screen of my laptop is a mirror, and it's one that won't let me change the channel or turn up the noise. Breathless, fearful, I type on. Not one to advertise weakness or pain, I know this writing session won't be much fun.

Typically, I write to figure out the world, to make sense of it, to bring clarity to the news and notes, the literature and liaisons of my daily life. I write to discover. I write to understand. That's why I began this blog; sharing is secondary in the quest. If you find understanding alongside me in my journey, so be it. Good for both of us. But I am here selfishly.

I write to understand, but there is nothing to understand here. There is no knowledge to be gained, no mysteries to sort out and pry through with a scalpel or a shovel, one clause or catalog at a time. It's really quite simple; we want to make death and loss complicated, but it rarely is. No, what I need isn't understanding. What I need is to merely feel better. And I've written enough words to know that writing can't do that for me.

Or at least I don't think it can. I've never really tried it. I had another option. Now I don't. The one thing I could count on to make me feel better, every part of every day, in every room of my house, regardless of how bad the hurt, is now gone. Even now, as I type that sentence and feel my heart drop and let out a heaving sigh across my dining room and into the Wednesday evening darkness, I know he would have heard that, felt that, recognized that, and arisen unsolicited from his half nap to run his nose below my fingers.

The missing energy of a bounding hundred pounds of lab reminding you to smile is a clanging, discordant silence.

One line from a book I read this summer and saved to write about until I had something to say came from Karen Swallow Prior's Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me. In this memoir connecting her life with classic literary texts, Swallow writes about about one particularly troubling experience from her teenage years, saying, "I"m sure plenty had gone through a great deal more, but I hadn't." I have wanted to apologize all week for being this scarred by the memory of a dog. Millions of people have lost dogs before. This is not special. It is not significant. And he's just a dog, after all. While I've been mired in grief, people around the world lost their homes, families, and lives in a punishing hurricane and crippling earthquake. Cancer still lords its sovereignty over helpless victims. I can't even claim this was the worst thing to happen in my own extended family this week.

But Swallow is right. Others may have experienced a similar loss, but I haven't. Not this dog. The tragedies surrounding all of us, while offering perspective, have no power to make me less sad. I've decided, then, to not apologize, and to not hide. I have been hurt over this, and I still hurt, and I say that out loud and without remorse.

For this loss was the loss of my companion in everything good. There is nowhere to go to escape that reality. So much of our family's routine, the best parts of what we do, seem a little less crowded right now. And I don't like the extra room. Every book read in our recliner, he was there. Whether it was the gentle and mindless back and forth of my fingers on his head, interrupted only by a sip of coffee or a page turn when he found me there alone, or the strategically placed full-body collapse he used to receive the methodical strokes from my foot when I had children in my lap, he made his presence known. Every weekday evening or Sunday afternoon walk, full of laughter and conversations between members of our family, was strategically planned to maximize his room to run and opportunities to splash. Every guest greeted, every strange dog warned, every dropped chip devoured in our yard and dining room. First in the morning, last in the evening to smile and greet and remind: I am here, I am happy, and you matter to me.

I find myself talking to him, of course. Or wanting to talk to him. To tell him what? I don't know. Whatever I told him on all those still moonlit winter walks we shared to keep me sane during the basketball season. Whatever I'm feeling, unfiltered, unabashed, no matter how ridiculous, goofy, or confused. Whatever I said to him in the times of wordless grief over the past ten years, whatever he knowingly heard that made him slow down and calmly and patiently rest his nose unobtrusively on my knee, his weight softly leaning against me, offering comfort.

It will be okay. Some time. But not now. Not this night. Tonight I mourn, receiving no trite answers, receiving no furry comfort. And so it must be.

But in the mourning I recognize that if he was a part of every good thing for this family, in this home, in this town, then I have much to be thankful for. Because I am reminded of him, by his absence in the good that we have, about eleven billion times a day.

Farewell, old friend.